Founding the American Way of Life

A Causal Analysis

Americans in 2023 are rightly concerned about their nation’s present and future.

Over the course of the past 60 years, the United States has experienced a profound intellectual, moral, and social revolution unlike anything seen before. We now live in a post-truth society where some college professors claim that 2 + 2 = 5 (literally), a recent nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States couldn’t (or wouldn’t) define what a woman is, and the federal government now sanctions the drugging and mutilation of American children as official policy.

Let that sink in for a few minutes.

This moral and cultural decline has continued apace since the 1960s, but in the last few years we seem to be accelerating toward the bottom of the nihilist abyss. Things have become so bad in the United States we frequently see headlines that speak of a “coming civil war” or a “national divorce.”

Surely this Brave New World would be unrecognizable to those young men who fought at Normandy almost 80 years ago, in the jungles of Viet Nam some 60 years ago, or in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan just 20 years ago. They might very well wonder what it was all for.

Such was not always the case, however.

There was a time in our past—and not too long ago—when it could be said with truth and propriety that the United States of America was the most moral nation in world history. The American people were seen as living according to an elevated, strict, and self-enforcing moral code that was the envy of people around the globe. Americans were once a principled and morally serious people for whom it could even be said they were morally greedy and proudly so. Tens of millions of immigrants came to this country precisely because they wanted to participate in the American way of life, which was a moral way of life.

Those of us who still believe in the basic moral goodness of America are called upon to defend the virtues and greatness of what America once was in the light of what it is becoming. To that end, let us ask a simple but fundamental question: What is meant by the American way of life? More specifically, the question is: What is the cause of the uniquely American way of life?

To answer these questions, we must return to the beginning, to the founding of the United States precisely because America is a “founded” nation. In 1776, the American people declared their independence from Great Britain and George III, and in 1787-88 “We the People” drafted and ratified a constitution that in turn created a new national government unlike anything they had known before.

The birth of the United States of America was, to put it in Hegelian terms, a world-historic event. The American Revolution and the America Founding fundamentally transformed America. (I’m treating the Revolution and the Founding as two distinct but temporally related events.) This transformation did not happen all at once as was attempted with the French Revolution, but it did set in motion forces that are still percolating down and through American society 245 years later.

America’s revolutionary-founding established the freest, most liberal society in world history. It unleashed millions of ordinary men and women to seek their highest material and spiritual values, to better their lives, and to pursue their long-term happiness.

The ideas and institutions brought forth by the Revolution inspired first a moral revolution in the minds of the people that liberated certain kinds of human action, and then in the wake of the Founding it unleashed a cultural revolution that changed the nature of social relationships between millions of Americans. The America of 1820 was a fundamentally different place relative to Great Britain’s American colonies in 1720.

This essay provides a glimpse into the transformative radicalism that was the American Founding.

To that end, the purpose of this essay is threefold: first, to elucidate a new theory about the relationship between constitutions and character formation; second, to indicate how the founders reconstituted the American way of life constitutionally and politically; and third, to outline the moral vision institutionalized by America’s founding fathers in the years between the framing of the Philadelphia Constitution in 1787 and the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791.

The operating premise of this essay is that political constitutions, forms of government, and certainly laws are the efficient cause shaping a people’s way of life, ethos, and spirit. (Behind constitutions and governments lie philosophic ideas, which, I contend, are the motor of history or the final cause. “Ideas have consequences” as Richard Weaver once famously wrote.)

In the next essay in this series, I shall uncover and reveal the distinctive human type—the “American character”—and the way of life—“The American Way of Life,” the “American ethos,” or the “American spirit”—generated by the founding fathers and the constitutional order they created.

Constitutions and Moral Formation

In what follows, I claim there is a necessary and complex relationship between ethics and politics that is manifested in what we sometimes call a “way of life” or what the great eighteenth-century French political philosopher, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (otherwise known as Montesquieu), called the “spirit of the laws.” This relationship is not the sole factor in the shaping of a particular way of life, but it is fundamental.

We also know from Montesquieu that there are other factors that help to shape a people’s culture and way of life. We know, for instance, there is often if not always an intimate relationship between a way of life and differing physical circumstances (e.g., topography and climate). It is a curious thing that different countries or peoples around the globe typically form distinct cultural manners and mores (and even their forms of government) based on various factors associated with their location.

Consider a few examples.

The character of a people living close to the equator will be invariably different from one living close to the poles, or the ethos of a people living in a desert will be different from one living seaside. Mountain cultures tend to be different from lowland cultures. Nomadic, farming, and seafaring cultures tend to admire and elevate different virtues. There are even cultural differences between farmers and ranchers living in the same state (e.g., think of the differences between farming culture in eastern South Dakota and ranching culture in western South Dakota).

To be clear: I am not saying that these physical factors are simply or primarily determinative, but I am claiming that differing peoples tend to value and nurture different human qualities based on their geographic circumstances. It is an observable fact that different peoples adapt their cultural manners and mores to their surroundings.

Still, the more fundamental point is this: constitutions, politics, and laws trump topography and climate in shaping a people’s moral character. Two countries that exist side-by-side can have, despite similar climates and topographies, entirely different cultures based on how they are organized politically, e.g., Haiti and the Dominican Republic or North and South Korea or Saudi Arabia and Iran.

As we look out at the various governments around the world and throughout history, we know that some political systems promote religious piety, some promote aristocratic virtues, some promote egalitarianism, some promote slavery, some promote racial or ethnic solidarity, some promote a commercial spirit, some promote freedom, and many other such values. In 1795, Zephaniah Swift from Connecticut identified the necessary relationship between political forms and a people’s moral culture in one of the most interesting legal-political treatises published during the founding era (i.e., A System of the Laws of the State of Connecticut). “In some of the most fertile countries of Asia and Africa, wrote Swift,

[w]here the spontaneous productions of nature furnish the inhabitants with all the luxuries and elegancies of life, the despotism of government has rendered them completely wretched and miserable. The title to their property is dependent on the arbitrary will of the master, and all the wealth they can accumulate is perpetually exposed to be taken from them by the hands of the rapacious vultures that govern them. Under such a government, genius droops, industry languishes, woe and misery reign triumphant, and happiness is banished from the land.

If despotism produces slavishness, dullness, dependence, dishonesty, injustice, and sloth, then republican self-government, by contrast, depends upon and promotes freedom, rationality, independence, honesty, integrity, courage, justice, hard work, frugality, and many other positive virtues.

Nowhere was this principle clearer than in pre-revolutionary America, where Great Britain’s 13 colonies were beyond the reach of the British State and therefore reliant on their own self-forming virtues. In his 1775 speech on conciliation with the colonies, Edmund Burke explained to his fellow parliamentarians how and why their old colonial policy of “salutary neglect” (which was, in effect, a part of Great Britain’s imperial constitution) had the unintended consequence of forging a new “Temper and Character” in their North American cousins that was now, ironically, resisting their ill-advised policies in the 1760s and 1770s (e.g., the Sugar, Stamp, Declaratory, Townshend, Tea, and Coercive Acts). By studying the moral character of the colonists, Burke thought he had located the deepest source of their opposition to Parliament’s statist policies. In the American temperament and moral character, he wrote,

a love of Freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole: and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your Colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of Liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth.

The spirit of American liberty was the product of many different causes, but the most important was undoubtedly the fact that the British State had left its American colonists alone for almost 150 years. The long arm of the British State was rarely seen or felt in the colonies. The Americans learned to govern themselves and even then, with a light touch. No people in the history of the world were freer than Great Britain’s American colonists.

Like Burke, America’s founding fathers knew that there was a cause-and-effect relationship between constitutions, forms of government, and laws on the one hand and the moral character of the citizenry on the other. In fact, the deeper truth is that there is a two-way, self-reinforcing relationship between ethics and politics, such that ethics informs politics and politics informs ethics. In other words, constitutions are both causes and effects, and moral cultures are both causes and effects.

This two-way relationship was neatly captured by John Adams in his 1776 pamphlet, Thoughts on Government. Following Montesquieu’s argument in the The Spirit of the Laws (1748), Adams argued that the “foundation of government is some principle or passion in the minds of the people.” Accordingly, despotisms produce citizens governed by “fear,” monarchies produce citizens governed by “honor,” and republics produced citizens governed by “virtue.” In other words, the people’s virtues and vices are the material cause of constitutions and government, but those constitutions and governments are also the efficient cause of the people’s moral character.

Sorting out this complex relationship, though, is no easy task. Take the American Revolution as a quick and obvious example.

We speak of an American Revolution not simply or solely because of the war for independence but because America was revolutionized in the light of its moral-political act to declare independence and everything that led to it and followed from it. In fact, as Adams once noted, the war was no part of the revolution. The war was simply an aftereffect of the more fundamental revolution that reconstituted American culture in the decade before Lexington and Concord. Nor was America’s declaration of independence simply a constitutional, political, or diplomatic act. More fundamentally, the Americans were declaring their moral and cultural independence from the mother country.

As a result of the revolution that occurred in the minds of the American people, new constitutions were framed and ratified, new republican governments were created, and new laws reflecting the republican spirit were passed. The American Revolution created a new society that was freer, more equal, more liberal, more just, and wealthier than any other known to man then or since. (The institution of slavery being the obvious exception to the rule.)

America’s revolutionary constitutions and governments were intended to usher in a new kind of society. Sharpening his original point, John Adams noted in a 1776 letter to Mercy Otis Warren, “[i]t is the Form of Government, which gives the decisive Colour to the Manners of the People, more than any other Thing.” A republican constitution and form of government will, he continued, “produce Strength, Hardiness Activity Courage Fortitude and Enterprice; the manly, noble and Sublime Qualities in human Nature, in Abundance.”

And how exactly does a republican constitution do that?

A constitution founded on republican principles necessarily “introduces,” according to Adams, “knowledge among the People, and inspires them with a conscious dignity, becoming Freemen.” As a result,

[a] general emulation takes place, which causes good humour, sociability, good manners, and good morals to be general. That elevation of sentiment, inspired by such a government, makes the common people brave and enterprizing. That ambition which is inspired by it makes them sober, industrious and frugal. You will find among them some elegance, perhaps, but more solidity; a little pleasure, but a great deal of business—some politeness, but more civility.

And in his A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787-88), Adams declared that virtue is the defining characteristic of republics and “that the virtues have been the effect of well-ordered constitution, rather than its cause.” Constitutions were understood by America’s founding fathers to be the efficient cause promoting certain virtues and a particular way of life.

Not all scholars of the American Founding agree with me (or with the founding fathers) on this point. Some do not think there is a relationship between constitutional forms and legal systems on the one hand and moral formation and culture on the other. In a previous essay on “The Birth of the Laissez-Faire Constitution,” I noted that some scholars of the American Founding do not think there was a relationship between the formation of the federal Constitution in 1787 and the subsequent development of a uniquely American moral-cultural spirit that can be defined as the spirit of individualism and the culture of free enterprise.

I disagree with this position—and so did the founding fathers.

The Founders’ Moral Vision

The Revolution unburdened colonial Americans of the oppressive restraints and regulations inherited from the semi-feudal, monarchical society of the Old World. We tend to forget that on July 3, 1776, the American colonies were still members of a monarchical empire governed by an aristocratic elite. A day later, they were transformed morally into equal republican citizens about to begin the process of freeing themselves from the cumbersome political, legal, economic, cultural, and yes, even the religious regulations of a dying world.

As I have argued in America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It, the American Revolution and the constitution-making that came with it unleashed a new moral spirit not just in the United States but around the world. And with this new moral spirit came an explosion of productive and entrepreneurial energy. The founders’ constitution of 1787, or what I call the laissez-faire constitution, separated economy and State (mostly), thereby liberating the productive and enterprising ambitions of millions of men and women.

What is most interesting about the United States as a moral “regime” (a term I do not like to use) is that its moral habits were not enforced by the federal government and for the most part not by the state governments either. (Local police powers did enforce some moral prohibitions.) There were no laws forcing men to work or to be frugal, and there were no laws protecting the lazy and profligate. The American people did not become moral by government mandated regimentation, ordered discipline, punitive laws, or ideological indoctrination.

The framers rejected, for instance, the Puritans’ political order, which used the coercive force of government to bend and shape the moral constitutions of its citizens. The Puritans dictated the clothing that people could and could not wear, when and where husbands and wives could kiss in public, the prices that people could charge for goods and services, and they literally turned the screws on individuals who broke their rules of appropriate social conduct. By contrast, the American political system was designed to promote maximal freedom as the source or cause for creating a new kind of moral culture.

The 1787 framers created a constitution that no doubt reflected certain pre-existing moral assumptions (e.g., the “spirit of liberty”), but it also inspired the creation of a new moral culture that was different from the old one. In other words, the framers built into the Constitution some (but not all) elements of the moral character of the American people as it existed in 1787 (e.g., their obsession with their rights), but they also created a constitution that promoted a new moral and cultural order that would move the country in a direction different from its colonial past.

The way in which the American people were constituted morally and culturally (i.e., their character, manners and mores, habits, tastes) was affected by the new constitutional order. In other words, the Constitution of 1787 took what is but it also inspired and promoted a new vision of what might be.

With the Revolution, with the new state constitutions created after 1776, and then finally with the ratification of the Philadelphia Constitution in 1788, the founders reconstituted not only their extant political order but also the then existing moral, cultural, and economic order as well. The America that was borne of the Revolution was radically different from the British-American colonies that were founded in the early seventeenth century.

Consider, for instance, two examples that sharply differentiate pre-revolutionary from post-revolutionary America.

First, the Puritan colonies founded in the seventeenth century constructed collectivist political communities built on the ideal that their societies must be unified social organisms, where the whole was greater than the sum of its individual parts. Each Puritan town was to be bound together by Christian love, which means to commit one’s life to the well-being and improvement of one’s neighbors as a fundamental moral duty. At the heart of the Puritan’s Christian love was the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Christian love required members of the community to live out the Apostle’s way of life, which was most clearly expressed in Acts 2:44-45 (“And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.”) and 4:32 (“And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.”) These near-theocratic regimes were organized hierarchically and governed by a divinely sanctioned, ruling elite (the “visible saints”), who had near unlimited power to enforce Biblical law. Membership in these communities required submission and obedience to community rules and regulations. The duty to obey was at the heart of Christian love. Dissent was not permitted.

Second, we also tend to forget that colonial America bore the remnants of a pre-modern, post-feudal, monarchical society prior to the Revolution. Britain’s American colonists were loyal subjects of their British kings for over 160 years. They took oaths of fealty to their kings, and they toasted them with affection. And with their loyalty to their kings came an understanding of how society should be organized. Pre-revolutionary Americans took it for granted that society was and should be divided into a hierarchy of finely graded social ranks and relations that recognized superior and inferior. From their British cousins they inherited a host of manners and mores that recognized established networks of various political dependencies. Thus, individuals in colonial American society were acutely aware of their standing in the social hierarchy, which means they knew their exact position relative to those above and below them. One’s location on the ladder of the the social hierarchy also defined one’s privileges, rights, and responsibilities. Obviously, the social hierarchy in the colonies was somewhat truncated relative to that of mother country, but colonial America was still a place where there were those who were recognized as the natural rulers of society. It was not uncommon in the century and a half before the Revolution for some families to essentially “own” certain political positions in their communities. Deference to one’s social superiors defined colonial American culture.

The new constitutional-political order created by the founding fathers retained many of the long-held moral principles, practices, and institutions of the American people that were in harmony with or supported the new republican theory of government (e.g., the “spirit of liberty”), but they also abandoned, discarded, or excluded many of the older moral and cultural artifacts that were in tension with or contradicted the new social order they envisioned. The founders’ view of the purpose and function of government was radically different from that held, for instance, by seventeenth-century Americans.

In the wake of the Revolution, many of America’s leading statesmen believed that the civil laws that governed the former colonies were in need of review, revision, and adaptation to the new republican constitutions and governments that were then being drafted and ratified. Independence and revolution gave American Whigs an unprecedented opportunity to transform the nature of their society from a Puritan-monarchical society to one based on a new theory of republican self-government.

Consider the efforts of Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. Soon after independence was declared, Jefferson and his colleagues began a decade-long attempt to reform a variety of the Commonwealth’s laws. Two of the reforms illustrate the nature of the reform impulse introduced by the spirit of the Revolution.

The first major reform concerned land law. Jefferson and his friends successfully abolished—either by statute or through their new constitutions—the legal devices of entail [i.e., laws requiring land to stay within families] and primogeniture [i.e., the right of succession belonging to the first-born child]. By abolishing the laws of entail and primogeniture, Jefferson and his revolutionary partners were destroying the last vestiges of feudalism and aristocracy and giving greater freedom and opportunities to ordinary men to better their lives.

The second major reform promoted by Jefferson and other revolutionaries around the country was to create a greater sphere for religious freedom in America. This was done by disestablishing various protestant denominations in the states, which led eventually to separating church and State. The goal was to create greater spheres of individual freedom in relation to religious belief and practice.

By distinguishing between public and private realms, the new theory and practice of republican self-government set limits to political power and it freed individual thought and action.

Constituting Republican Self-Government

The Philadelphia Constitution was created in the wake of these reforms (and many others) and it was both a record and a proclamation of the American peoples’ republican spirit as it existed in 1787.  The Constitution of 1787 also represented a projection of how that spirit was to be manifested in the future. In other words, the founders’ Constitution is the consequence of something old and the cause of something new.

The framers built their political constitution on the extant moral-cultural constitution of the people (i.e., the best of what they were) and what they could become in the future (i.e., the best of what they might be). The founders were unwilling to leave the American people simply as they were. Their goal was to make them even better. They took the best of what the American people were in 1787, and they built on that to project a new-model man for a new republican future. (This is the subject of my next essay.)

Unlike Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his followers during the French Revolution, American constitution-makers did not seek to begin de novo and to remake Americans according to some predesigned, philosophic prototype. Their task, instead, was to take the best of what they were or might be (discarding the rest) and to establish a political-economic system that would guide them directly or indirectly toward habits of right action.

Identifying the founders’ moral vision (i.e., the moral principles and practices they kept, discarded, and reimagined) is a complicated subject, but if I were to reduce it to its core components, I would say that the founders institutionalized three fundamental principles: freedom, individual rights, and rational self-interest. These core principles were constitutionalized politically in the form of a limited, constitutional republic that in turn encouraged certain virtues: e.g., rationality, prudence, independence, honesty, integrity, moderation, fortitude, justice, industry, economy, goodwill, cooperation, etc.

The founders’ constitution created and launched a new kind of moral order of self-governing men and women hitherto unseen in human history.

At this point, let me pause and make my position clear.

Like Plato and Aristotle, I do think that constitutions and law influence the formation of moral character and culture, but unlike them I do not think that government should play a positive or active (i.e., coercive) role in shaping the moral character of the citizenry.

This does not mean, however, that I think the U. S. Constitution is or must be neutral or value-free on such matters. Quite the opposite. I claim that America’s laissez-faire constitution is infused with moral principles and a moral vision and therefore plays a prominent role in promoting a certain way of life. In fact, I claim that the founders’ non-coercive moral code is much more demanding and elevating than any moral code imposed by force.

How does that work if government does not play a proactive role in using its institutions to create a certain kind of moral culture?

The truth of the matter is that character formation can be the direct result of government action, but it can also be the indirect result of government inaction. Put differently, freedom is its own moral seminary. Freedom inspires and requires individuals to live their lives according to a strict moral code grounded and in harmony with the moral laws of nature. Nature’s moral laws come with their own rewards and punishments, which are absolute and objective.

My contention is that the founders knowingly and intentionally created a limited-government constitution that had no power to positively form character as Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Lenin, Mao, and Khomeini would have it. Instead, they created a political order that nevertheless inspired and resulted indirectly in the formation of a certain kind of moral character and way of life shared by the majority of community members.

I will go even further and suggest that the soul-type generated by America’s laissez-faire constitution was morally superior to that wished for by their Puritan forebearers or even the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers.

My point here can be proven easily by asking the following question: Does the current government-directed education system produce better citizens than those who are homeschooled? Obviously, home-schooled or privately-schooled children, particularly those educated with a classical curriculum (think Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Washington, Adams, and Jefferson), did and do receive both an intellectually and morally superior education compared to those educated in and by the government schools. Nay, more: homeschooling is a morally superior social institution relative to government schooling.

This unique way of life that we associate with the American people was not born willy-nilly, nor was it simply created de novo. Instead, the American way of life was both captured and released by the framers of Constitution. In other words, the American spirit developed both spontaneously over the course of decades and was subsequently captured by the framers in their constitution, but this way of life was also redirected and released as a result of the framers’ intentions and design.

The framers of the United States Constitution were not open and explicit moral legislators in the vein of Moses, Jesus Christ, or Muhammed, nor did they create the kind of political order that Plato and Aristotle promoted and the Spartan Lycurgus created.  They did not provide a list of moral dos and don’ts. Instead, America’s founders framed a political constitution that was built on the moral foundation of freedom and justice, and they made civil laws that were guided by certain moral standards, expectations, and aspirations.

The spirit of the American Constitution is imbued with a positive vision of a certain kind of human being defined by certain excellences and virtues. The morally ideal citizen is one who is self-owning, self-governing, and self-reliant in the fullest sense of the term—a citizen who uses his unalienable right to freedom to achieve his highest potential and values and who makes the world around him just a little bit better than he found it. In other words, America’s new-model man made himself moral rather than the government making him “moral.”

Such a constitution—even the best possible constitution—cannot sustain itself, however, if the people become corrupted. Republican self-government is only as good as the people who support it, which is why every generation must know, experience, and fight to defend the “spirit of liberty” as the American way of life. Nothing else will do.